Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

18 Escape From Poverty Shield, at the start of a record-breaking career in that under-21 competition for Sydney’s grade clubs. Keith had joined Mosman at a high point in its history. Restricted to second grade since its foundation in 1908/09 because of the sub-standard state of Mosman Oval, the club had been promoted to first grade as recently as 1927/28, playing at Rawson Oval about a kilometre or so to the north. Over the ten years from 1928/29 to 1938/39 it won the premiership four times: by 2012 it had failed to win it again. Prominent among its leading players in the 1930s, along with McCabe, was Ken Gulliver, a leg-break bowling allrounder, who played only a handful of first-class games just before and after the Second World War but would eventually have one of the best-ever records in Sydney grade cricket. Early in the 1934/35 season Keith began edging towards this elite company through promotion from third to second grade and further appearances in the Poidevin-Gray Shield, despite the need to sit the New South Wales Intermediate Certificate examinations in late 1934. In January 1935 The Sydney Morning Herald listed his results among hundreds of others. His passes in all subjects – English, History, Maths 1, Maths 2, French and Technical Drawing, with As in Elementary Science [Physics and Chemistry] and Woodwork – were among the best at his Neutral Bay High School. These results suggest he would have coped well had he stayed on at school to take the Leaving Certificate that could qualify him for entry to Sydney University. But it’s unlikely such action occurred to him, his family or even his teachers. In an era when private schools and a few selective government schools dominated the lists of successful Leaving candidates, there was no scope for Neutral Bay High students to move on to further study. Keith’s Intermediate results equipped him for clerical work and it’s as a ‘clerk’ that he appears in the electoral rolls when he reached the voting age of 21 in the early 1940s. His workplace remains a puzzle to nephew Peter Bergstrom and niece Sandra Burgess, whose different fragments of knowledge discounted this writer’s speculation that he may have worked for his uncle, builder Bill Bergstrom, Peter’s father. Similarly, there’s no evidence about when he learned to use the earth-moving machinery that provided him with income in 1950s Perth; and none to explain how and when he’d taken the woodworking skills displayed in the Intermediate examination to a professional level by the time he was building his own house in the Perth hills.